Barn quilt movement got its start in Ohio

Suzi Parron, the woman who literally wrote the book on the subject, says the most incredible fact about America’s barn quilt trail movement is this: “It really did start with one person and this person’s idea has resonated with thousands and thousands of others.”

It all began with Donna Sue Groves, an arts advocate in Adams County, Ohio, who conceived and proposed what would become the Adams County Quilt Sampler, says Parron, who wrote “Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement” with Groves’ help.

It began with a single barn quilt panel, the Ohio Star, unveiled on Oct. 13, 2001. That set the first strand in a “quilt clothesline” that would rapidly unreel through the county and then on to more than 30 other Ohio counties.

Since then, the idea of painted quilt panels as community expression, public art and a tourism draw has threaded out from Ohio to most of the country, to the point where quilt trails run through all but six states and extend into Canada, Parron said in a recent interview. She has documented about 6,000 of them, but she never hears of some, and she knows more go up every day. “There is no way of knowing how many there are,” she said.

Growth of Kentucky’s trails has slowed in recent years, but only because “almost every county in Kentucky has quilt trails,” she said.

On the other hand, Gibson County, Ind., which unveiled its quilt trail as part of its bicentennial celebration, this year, is one of just a half-dozen Hoosier counties to join the line. “Quilt trails in Indiana are really going to grow over the next few years,” Parron predicted.

She didn’t know what she was getting into when she met Groves and began research for “Barn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail Movement,” she said.

Sales of her 2012 book soared and speaking engagements became so frequent that she quit her job teaching high school English to devote full time to the topic.

She’s not allowed to reveal sales figures, but just a year after its release, her book is in its fourth printing, she said. She draws some 3,000 followers with her Facebook page and blog (americanquilttrail.blogspot.com), where she sells books and calendars. And she’s working research for a second book into a nationwide book signing and speaking tour.